A/N: A series of short stories about how the Enterprise means completely different things to each of the crew members. They will vary a bit in style and length. The first is one of the more rambling ones, as the PoV person is marinated in alcohol for most of the story. Constructive criticism is more than welcome.
Star Trek is not mine, and I do not intend to profit from it or step on anyone's toes as far as copyright is concerned. If, however, Paramount ever decides to swap the copyrights for a large stash of cheap tea, I'd like an E-mail.
Opportunity
He's halfway through his fourth glass of whiskey when he realizes he likes this altogether too much. He's finished his fifth when he realizes he doesn't give a damn. The sixth lasts a while, as he wonders whether half full or half empty would be more positive in his particular situation. Jocelyn, were she there, would make the issue a lot simpler - she'd simply pronounce it too much damn alcohol. She might have a point, he thinks as he empties the glass. And that alone is testament to how drunk he is - he's certain that admitting Jocelyn could be right about anything goes against his very nature
He'd bickered with her from the day they met - first, edgy, interesting quarrels laced with tension. Then, over time the arguments got older and cut deeper, and the tension and excitement disappeared so that all there was left was thick, bone-deep exhaustion. The occasional lulls between the storms only made things worse. He isn't drinking to drown out the yelling and slamming doors, after all. If he's to never see his wife - ex-wife - again, he wants to remember those. Another good reason to leave this whole damn mess behind.
When he finally passes out, the floor feels soft and inviting.
The next morning, he wakes up with the mother of all hangovers, and jabs a detox hypospray into his own neck with relish. Then he walks out of his hotel room and heads straight for the nearest bar. He discovers that whiskey doesn't taste so good with the medicines still buzzing around his system. There is a woman at the end of the bar with a nasty scar across one cheek, and when she turns to the bartender to order another drink, he can see that it extends up over the bridge of her nose and into her hairline. For a moment his fingers itch for a closer look - whoever patched her up can't have done a very good job of it - then he realizes that her hair is sort of auburn. It's a double punch to the gut, because auburn is Jocelyn's hair color, and that hurts almost as much as the realization that even though it isn't her hair color, really, almost auburn is close enough to trigger a flood of half forgotten sensations and phrases.
Even though hyposprays with whiskey for dessert is enough to make a man want to phaser his tongue permanently numb, Leonard still manages to get wasted before lunch. He can't quite seem to find his hotel, although he was almost completely sure where he placed it, and since it's a nice day he just settles down in the park he's discovered instead. There is a wooden bench that seems nicely stable in a fuzzy and tilting world. He knows he's somewhere near Atlanta, still in Georgia, so the blurry conversations around him shouldn't be in another language. He feels like they are, though. He doesn't grasp anything being said. Instead of listening, he focuses on watching.
A man walks by, and he has a slight limp. Maybe a strained muscle, maybe it's to do with his bones - osteoporia... osteporo... something. Maybe it's cancer. Leonard suppresses the urge to kick himself. Was he always this morbid a drunk? Watch the pretty ladies in the sunlight instead of looking for disease, he tells himself. So, to take his mind off things, he plays a game with himself. Every person he sees, he connects with something that isn't deadly. Or Jocelyn.
First is a young girl with a kite, and he lets that one slide because it hits too close to home.
Next is a man, with a full, black beard and bushy eyebrows, and he thinks he might just leave his stubble to its own devices for a while, because the man looks so fierce and funny. Also, Jocelyn hates stubble. Leonard awards himself a penalty for breaking his own rules.
A couple of girls, belly on the grass, sucking up the summer sun, and he's back in the apple orchard behind his house, crunching on a ripe fruit, eyes on the sky. A woman with a dog walks by, and he doesn't want to leave his mental orchard, so he just adds his old labrador to the setting, scratching him behind the ears as he settles down beside him. He can almost feel the earth beneath him, warm and dry against his back.
Then another man walks by, he rubs his arm irritably, and the orchard is gone. Instead he's in the hospital, treating his first patient as a doctor, a real one. He runs the dermal regenerator across the cut on the man's arm, watching as it seals itself. He's happy. As the man walks out the door, he catches a glimpse of a woman in the waiting room with long auburn hair and green eyes, and she returns his smile. There's Jocelyn again, in his practice, digging her way into his life with easy smiles and easier banter. There's the dead labrador, the way she helped him bury him in the apple orchard. There's the way the apples tasted on her lips, mixed with saliva and something sweet, something he can't find anywhere else. There is the way Jocelyn and his little daughter, his baby, sit in the grass, digging for worms and pirate's gold.
Apparently, he only needs to want out of the park badly enough to be able to find his hotel. It isn't enough, however, he realizes when he gets back. He needs to get out of fucking Georgia, because everything in Georgia is only a car ride from home. So he folds up everything, and goes off. To Iowa, he thinks, though it could be Alaska for all he cares. 'It's dead, Leonard,' he tells himself. 'Now you get over yourself and start over.'
It only takes a few days in Iowa, with all the auburn-haired Iowan women, to discover that Iowa isn't far enough away, not even close. This discovery is cemented the day he goes through his suitcase for a clean shirt, and instead finds himself fishing out the unsigned divorce papers at the bottom. They are still in their envelope. Across the front of the envelope is written in messy, sprawling letters: 'Mail these back to me. If you come within a hundred mile radius of Joanna, I know where Sheriff Jarrow keeps his phaser.'
Jocelyn always did know him too well.
The envelope is soaked in his alcohol of the week and burned in the grimy bathtub of his hotel room. The papers lie on his bedside table for another few days, gathering dust. Gradually, Leonard begins to think about the future. He knows better than to include Jocelyn, though she continues to crop up with alarming frequency. Mostly, he thinks about somehow circumventing Jarrow's phaser and going south with Joanna and his medkit. Because if Jocelyn is in every woman he sees, Joanna is simply everywhere: playing in the trees, dangling her legs over the side of a wall, laughing as she runs across the grass.Joanna belongs in Georgia, though. He knows he can't take her away, much as he wants to.
Finally, he's had too much. He wakes up with his head on the bathroom tiles one time too many, and fills out the divorce papers in a half-drunk stupor. Then he takes a cab to the nearest shuttleport and enlists. He hates space. Honestly, truly does - the thought of being stuck in a glorified tin can suspended in emptiness makes him want to punch something. But right now, he's fucked earth up too badly to want to stay there with the memories - there is no grass in space.
Besides, he really, really wants to be off-planet once Jocelyn discovers the elaborate string of insults he added to the margins of the divorce papers.
Starfleet academy isn't half as bad as he suspected it'd be. As a trained doctor, he has very few classes - mostly some weird variant of epidemiology that's been tailored to fit starships and xenobiology. Alien diseases that attack the human body are already part of the ordinary med school curriculum, but alien diseases that only attack aliens is something new. In his spare time, he volunteers at the naval hospital. He's been given a room for himself because of his seniority, but he's only been living there for a week when his friend from the recruitment shuttle commandeers his couch.
"You don't mind, do you?" asks Jim Kirk as he tosses his bags unceremoniously into the corner. "My old roommate kicked me out, and I need somewhere to crash."
Three years later, they are still sharing a room, and if Jim is aware how much it helps Leonard to have someone to look after, he never mentions it. Somewhere between hyposprays, whiskey, grousing over Jim's complete lack of a self-preservation instinct, doctoring, classes, more grousing, and more hyposprays, he manages to laugh, and plan for the future.
When he is assigned to the Enterprise, he brings Jim along without a second thought. He's the only family he has left.
He was right about space, though, he decides. Darkness, and danger - more than he possibly imagined. Part of him is still stuck in an orchard in Georgia, longing for a future he can't have. But there is so much more than that: a crew that relies on him, a baby brother of a captain, and a ton of new responsibilities. No-one ever calls him Leonard anymore. Jim, after one ill-timed comment about his bones being all left to him, now refuses to call him anything else.
Bones finishes his glass of whiskey, the one he allows himself after a long day, and glances at the replicated apple on his desk. Maybe he'll go back for Joanna someday, and he can show her how much things have changed. Then the sickbay doors slide open, and a limp, figure in a gold tunic is carried through them by a security officer and a stony-faced vulcan. Jim is breathing heavily, and there is a large red stain blossoming beneath his ribcage.
"Bones!" he says, his grin somewhat strained. "Tell Spock I'm alright, will you? He's been bitching at me since we beamed back and -"
Spock carefully lowers Jim onto a bed. "I do not bitch, Captain. Ignoring Starfleet protocol to beam down with the landing party is illogical and hazardous-"
"Dammit, Jim," Bones mutters under his breath, and fishes out his tricorder.